The New Alphabet is a typeface developed by Wim Crouwel in 1967. The project was a reaction against the first generation of low-resolution computer typesetting that Crouwel found awful to look at. Visiting a print exhibition in Germany, he noticed that the digital production of the Garamond tyeface showed roundings inconsistencies from one size to another because of the small amount of pixels used.

As a functional modernist, Crouwel was of the idea that we should submit to the demands of the machine and that it would be better to design a typeface that was suitable for the machine available rather than forcing it to use the typefaces we knew. “The critics all said that we shouldn’t follow technology and that it should follow us,” he says. “But my point was that for the next twenty years, we would be dealing with technical limitations so it would be best to develop typefaces that at least worked.”

Crouwel breaks into passionate German as he aligns the ideas inside his New Alphabet with those of the Bauhaus. “German is a very difficult language,” he says. “They use capitals at the beginning of every noun, but Bauhaus scrapped that. They put everything in small case to save time. It was revolutionary. To fit with the parameters of the machines, I also used all lower case, but added under-strokes to indicate capitals.”

Primitive computers could only make straight lines so Crouwel stripped the round edges from traditional letters to create a highly abstract typeface based on a dot-matrix system. Its characters consisted exclusively of horizontal and vertical lines with roundings at either 45 or 90 degrees. The face was as high as it was wide, thus lining in every way so it would fit in every grid system. The brilliance of the New Alphabet is that it could be created on early computers consistently and that it would look exactly the same in every size and grade.

At the time, Crouwel called his results a theoretical exercise, a direction of thinking that was more about testing the possibilities and limits of new technologies than creating good typefaces. “The New Alphabet was over-the-top and never meant to be really used,” Crouwel says. “ It was unreadable.”

But to his great surprise, the script made a come-back decades later in 1988 when it was adapted by Peter Saville for the cover of Joy Division’s singles compilation album Substance. It subsequently went on to enjoy a renewed interest through the 90s.